You are here

Finishing the Job: Modernizing Maryland’s Bail System

The bail system in Maryland is unfair, unsafe, and ineffective.

This Abell Report, written by John Clark of the Pretrial Justice Institute, provides an overview of why bail reform is urgently needed in Maryland; explores the recent efforts to achieve reform in Baltimore, and highlights recent progress in other states using evidence-based risk assessments that yield a more just, effective, and cost-efficient pretrial system.

What’s wrong with the current system?

It results in economic and racial disparities;

It allows defendants who pose a risk to community safety but have access to money to buy their way out of jail, and

It ignores evidence-based practices that have been effective in other jurisdictions.

Other states, including Colorado and Kentucky, have implemented evidence-based reforms that could provide a model for Maryland. Indeed, over the past few years, two high-level state commissions have studied Maryland’s bail system and recommended a series of reforms that would result in a major overhaul of that system.

This report offers a path toward implementing the necessary changes and calls on local and state leaders to take action now.

Abell Featured Report

The 2017 Abell Award in Urban Policy goes to a paper that proposes to address the complexities of youth crime and incarceration in Baltimore City through an evidence-based program of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Across the country, cities like Baltimore, with aging infrastructure and concentrated poverty, wrestle with meeting the costs of a safe water supply and ensuring low-income residents have access to water they can afford.

Dual enrollment programs offer high school students the chance to enroll in college courses and earn transferable college credit while they are still pursuing a high school diploma. Research shows that dual enrollment participants are more likely to enroll and persist in college, earn higher...

Efforts to combat drug use through the war on drugs have proven ineffective, fueling the highest rates of incarceration in the world and deleteriously affecting public health. Taken together, these challenges have fueled interest in creative and effective interventions aimed to reduce harm to...

What if we discovered a plant that grew quickly and in multiple climates, could make everything from textiles to medicine to fuel, and could be more valuable to a farmer’s bottom line than most commodity crops?